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Pulling Over Drivers Is Part of a Long-Term Solution

Tom Vanderbilt is the author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).” He writes the “Transport” column for Slate and blogs at How We Drive.

Updated March 6, 2013, 4:57 PM

A few weeks ago, I saw something unusual happen in New York City: A driver was pulled over for going through a red light. The police demanded the driver’s license and registration, and after a brief moment in the squad car, returned to tell the driver to “pay more attention to your surroundings.”

The driver, in fact, was me. A bit pressed for time, I had, rather uncharacteristically — and without seeing the squad car directly behind me — done what I see happen, unchecked and with dreary regularity on the city streets: I “scooted” through the intersection on what had once been the yellow but in reality was a full red. As a pedestrian (and driver) in New York I know that a red light is really on the beginning of a sort of stopping process for a stream of traffic. When I am waiting to cross a street, I institute my own mental “clearance phase” of a extra few seconds, even after getting the walk signal.

What often matters in reducing traffic violations is not punitive action per se, but simply the process of receiving a warning.

After receiving the reprimand from the officer, I thanked him. Not for letting me off without a ticket, but for actually pulling me over in the first place. What was remarkable about the event was not just that it was me — this was the first time I’ve been pulled over in some two decades of city driving — but that it was happening at all.

As a parker, I have a vivid and intimate awareness of the presence of the city’s parking enforcement officers, and have learned many times the consequences of running afoul of them. Moving from the victimless crime of parking violations to driving violations, however — and drivers kill more people in the city each year than die in “stranger homicides” — the diligence of the traffic wardens seems to have been left at the curb. When’s the last time you actually saw a driver pulled over for driving faster than the citywide speed limit on, to cite one of many examples, Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn?

But wouldn’t that just be another way for the city to raise revenue? Wrong. Traffic is a complex system in which interventions can be exceedingly difficult to track, but there are a few truisms: The more traffic violations, the more crashes — both on an individual and systemic level. And people who commit on-road violations are more likely to be involved in crime outside the car. Societally, the more crashes, the higher the cost to the city (according to a recent study, four years of pedestrian injury in San Francisco cost the city $20 million, the majority of it paid by the public); to use an example from epidemiology, you can issue the “vaccine” of traffic tickets, or you can wait for the outbreak of fatalities. We don’t accept the word “accident” in those cases.

You might think that the police officer who pulled me over wasn’t doing his job, because he didn’t ticket me. But there is evidence that what often matters in reducing traffic violations is not punitive action per se, but simply the process of being pulled over and receiving the warning. This imparts the idea that the driver has violated some community norm, and reminds him (and other drivers who pass by) that there are police looking after those norms.

The effects can be dramatic and long-lasting. Take the example of a study in Miami Beach: after a two-week period in which drivers received police warnings for violating pedestrian right-of-way in crosswalks, the violation rate dropped drastically — and a year later, without enforcement, it was still down.

Enforcement alone is never enough: roads should be designed that clearly suggest how drivers should behave. It is in some combination of the two (among a host of other factors) that drivers will finally get the message.